Here's something you might be interested in.
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Light is a kind of noise
A tale of Marks in the dark, plus new releases including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Morlocks, like film critics, prefer the dark.
Movie
Under the Shadow ****
It’s <em>Paranormal Activity</em> Teheran style in this realistically told little haunted house story set against the backdrop of true-life horror. An Iranian mother is bounced from medical school after being found guilty of being politically active in her youth. With her husband away on business and her young daughter battling night terrors, the shift from family drama to djinn game is so subtle as to be barely perceived. Like any great horror film, Under the Shadow is about more than just cheap thrills. Forcing the man of the house to make an early exit was a stroke of genius. That leaves first-time director Babak Anvari ample room to focus on the mother-daughter relationship, expertly smuggling in issues concerning the treatment of women during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. And credit supervising sound designer Alex Joseph for transforming the tiny flat into an aural chamber of horrors. Not to be missed.
Curmudgeonly grouch Scott Marks has, like some kind of critical Sam Jackson, had it with these blankety-blank cell phones in the blankety-blank theater! Read all about it here, and then scooch over to his rapturous review of Under the Shadow to see what makes such a man swoon. (I’m kind of with him on both points: any light that’s not onscreen is hugely distracting in a movie theater — even those little side-light thingies that help you find the stairs.
Movie
Nocturnal Animals
A vile, vulgar nightmare of a movie that amounts to little more than a dirty garbage bag filled with closeups. Tom Ford’s (<em>A Single Man</em>) latest begins on shock with a quartet of naked Mrs. Grapes go-go dancing and quickly plummets. Ford intercuts two stories — the life of cauterized gallery owner Amy Adams clashes and the visualization of an existential hallucination in manuscript form penned by her long-estranged husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) that recently arrived in the mail — neither of which is particularly meritorious. Borrowing liberally from the <em>Hot Rods to Hell</em> playbook, the novel details a violent encounter between a gang of hoodlums and the unsuspecting family that acts as their target. The only laughs the film has to offer come in the form of embarrassing flashback transitions. One redeemable facet: Laura Linney does a dead-on impression of Dina Merrill. Other than that, file this messy nocturnal emission under “must to avoid.”
And the older I get, the more joy I find in genre pics done right. For pure moviegoing pleasure, gimme a double bill of the submarine pic Black Sea and the neo-Western Hell or High Water, and I’m set.)
Movie
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them *
Poor Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, sensitive bordering on priggish): all this English wizard wants to do is protect the world’s magical animals from “the most vicious creature on earth: humans.” But doing so means traveling to America, where even the wizards are against him — right off the boat, he’s picked up for possession of contraband critters. Further, the Yanks have “backwards relations with no-majs” (“no-maj" being the local term for the non-magical): for one thing, no intermarriage. To make matters worse, a bunch of anti-magic crusaders are at work, righteously rousing the rabble. They’ve got some reason to be afraid, what with the strange and violent goings on of late, and as we’re reminded, “when no-maj’s are afraid, they attack.” (It’s the reason the wizards have gone underground.) But what the pious monsters don’t realize is that Freud was right: the greatest evil arises from denying your magic identity in early childhood. And finally, there’s a dark wizard about, one who would like nothing more than to have it out with the portion of the population that <em>can’t</em> control minds and manipulate matter at will. Set against all these thunderous themes are the antics of a bunch of uninspired imaginary animals — sorry, fantastic beasts — and an astonishingly winning supporting cast that very nearly atones for everything else.
Scott’s other adventures were more in line with his cell-phone experience. Nocturnal Animals? “A dirty garbage bag filled with closeups.” Elle? “Redundant rape-fulfillment fantasy.” Kiki, Love to Love? “Fluff.”
Movie
Edge of Seventeen **
Writer-director-producer Kelly Fremon Craig’s <em>The Edge of Seventeen</em> offers a verbally frank take on the horrors of adolescence — difficult parents, difficult siblings, difficult romantic interests, and even difficult best friends — gentled just enough to provide solid entertainment. (Especially if you liked John Hughes’ teen oeuvre.) An illustration: when star Hailee Steinfeld breaks in on her favorite teacher (an appealing Woody Harrelson) during his lunch hour and declares her intention to kill herself over her mountainous pile of woes, it isn’t quite played for laughs, but it’s also clear that he doesn’t take her threat seriously, and so neither should we. The story is also largely purged of the unreal/hyperreal realm of social media; we get a hint of cyberlonging here and an accidentally sent text there, but Screenworld is no kind of dominant, omnipresent force. So it’s no surprise when the protagonist refers to herself as an old soul, recalls her best friend being dressed like an old man when they first met, and declares to a would-be suitor that when she looks at him, she sees an old man. It's a snapshot of the kids of today, overlaid with the filter of a somewhat more grownup sensibility.
He’s off to catch Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Bleed for This right now, out of respect for Ang Lee and a weird devotion to boxing pics ever since Scorsese made Raging Bull. We’ll see.
I didn’t fare much better, though I did love much of the cast in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. (Those sisters! And they make cocoa!) And any attention paid to my old friend Bosch is better than no attention paid to my old friend Bosch, so hooray for that aspect of Heironymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil. But the only real joy I had came from the coming-of-age drama The Edge of Seventeen, and even that was tempered by a nagging wonderment about whether it really worked to slap a John Hughes template on teens in the Teens. Still, it was smartly done.
In other news, it isn’t often that a genuine Duncan Shepherd four-star film shows up on the big screen, so think about checking out the restored Tampopo at the Ken. And over at MoPA tonight, there’s a double bill from Scott’s old buddy Wolfgang Hastert, with the man himself in attendance.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Light is a kind of noise
A tale of Marks in the dark, plus new releases including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Light is a kind of noise
A tale of Marks in the dark, plus new releases including Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Morlocks, like film critics, prefer the dark.
Movie
Under the Shadow ****
It’s <em>Paranormal Activity</em> Teheran style in this realistically told little haunted house story set against the backdrop of true-life horror. An Iranian mother is bounced from medical school after being found guilty of being politically active in her youth. With her husband away on business and her young daughter battling night terrors, the shift from family drama to djinn game is so subtle as to be barely perceived. Like any great horror film, Under the Shadow is about more than just cheap thrills. Forcing the man of the house to make an early exit was a stroke of genius. That leaves first-time director Babak Anvari ample room to focus on the mother-daughter relationship, expertly smuggling in issues concerning the treatment of women during the time of the Iran-Iraq war. And credit supervising sound designer Alex Joseph for transforming the tiny flat into an aural chamber of horrors. Not to be missed.
Curmudgeonly grouch Scott Marks has, like some kind of critical Sam Jackson, had it with these blankety-blank cell phones in the blankety-blank theater! Read all about it here, and then scooch over to his rapturous review of Under the Shadow to see what makes such a man swoon. (I’m kind of with him on both points: any light that’s not onscreen is hugely distracting in a movie theater — even those little side-light thingies that help you find the stairs.
Movie
Nocturnal Animals
A vile, vulgar nightmare of a movie that amounts to little more than a dirty garbage bag filled with closeups. Tom Ford’s (<em>A Single Man</em>) latest begins on shock with a quartet of naked Mrs. Grapes go-go dancing and quickly plummets. Ford intercuts two stories — the life of cauterized gallery owner Amy Adams clashes and the visualization of an existential hallucination in manuscript form penned by her long-estranged husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) that recently arrived in the mail — neither of which is particularly meritorious. Borrowing liberally from the <em>Hot Rods to Hell</em> playbook, the novel details a violent encounter between a gang of hoodlums and the unsuspecting family that acts as their target. The only laughs the film has to offer come in the form of embarrassing flashback transitions. One redeemable facet: Laura Linney does a dead-on impression of Dina Merrill. Other than that, file this messy nocturnal emission under “must to avoid.”
And the older I get, the more joy I find in genre pics done right. For pure moviegoing pleasure, gimme a double bill of the submarine pic Black Sea and the neo-Western Hell or High Water, and I’m set.)
Movie
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them *
Poor Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, sensitive bordering on priggish): all this English wizard wants to do is protect the world’s magical animals from “the most vicious creature on earth: humans.” But doing so means traveling to America, where even the wizards are against him — right off the boat, he’s picked up for possession of contraband critters. Further, the Yanks have “backwards relations with no-majs” (“no-maj" being the local term for the non-magical): for one thing, no intermarriage. To make matters worse, a bunch of anti-magic crusaders are at work, righteously rousing the rabble. They’ve got some reason to be afraid, what with the strange and violent goings on of late, and as we’re reminded, “when no-maj’s are afraid, they attack.” (It’s the reason the wizards have gone underground.) But what the pious monsters don’t realize is that Freud was right: the greatest evil arises from denying your magic identity in early childhood. And finally, there’s a dark wizard about, one who would like nothing more than to have it out with the portion of the population that <em>can’t</em> control minds and manipulate matter at will. Set against all these thunderous themes are the antics of a bunch of uninspired imaginary animals — sorry, fantastic beasts — and an astonishingly winning supporting cast that very nearly atones for everything else.
Scott’s other adventures were more in line with his cell-phone experience. Nocturnal Animals? “A dirty garbage bag filled with closeups.” Elle? “Redundant rape-fulfillment fantasy.” Kiki, Love to Love? “Fluff.”
Movie
Edge of Seventeen **
Writer-director-producer Kelly Fremon Craig’s <em>The Edge of Seventeen</em> offers a verbally frank take on the horrors of adolescence — difficult parents, difficult siblings, difficult romantic interests, and even difficult best friends — gentled just enough to provide solid entertainment. (Especially if you liked John Hughes’ teen oeuvre.) An illustration: when star Hailee Steinfeld breaks in on her favorite teacher (an appealing Woody Harrelson) during his lunch hour and declares her intention to kill herself over her mountainous pile of woes, it isn’t quite played for laughs, but it’s also clear that he doesn’t take her threat seriously, and so neither should we. The story is also largely purged of the unreal/hyperreal realm of social media; we get a hint of cyberlonging here and an accidentally sent text there, but Screenworld is no kind of dominant, omnipresent force. So it’s no surprise when the protagonist refers to herself as an old soul, recalls her best friend being dressed like an old man when they first met, and declares to a would-be suitor that when she looks at him, she sees an old man. It's a snapshot of the kids of today, overlaid with the filter of a somewhat more grownup sensibility.
He’s off to catch Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Bleed for This right now, out of respect for Ang Lee and a weird devotion to boxing pics ever since Scorsese made Raging Bull. We’ll see.
I didn’t fare much better, though I did love much of the cast in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. (Those sisters! And they make cocoa!) And any attention paid to my old friend Bosch is better than no attention paid to my old friend Bosch, so hooray for that aspect of Heironymus Bosch: Touched by the Devil. But the only real joy I had came from the coming-of-age drama The Edge of Seventeen, and even that was tempered by a nagging wonderment about whether it really worked to slap a John Hughes template on teens in the Teens. Still, it was smartly done.
In other news, it isn’t often that a genuine Duncan Shepherd four-star film shows up on the big screen, so think about checking out the restored Tampopo at the Ken. And over at MoPA tonight, there’s a double bill from Scott’s old buddy Wolfgang Hastert, with the man himself in attendance.
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